No, You Can’t Be ‘Kind of’ Pregnant

A couple of years ago, the @MillennialWoes account put up one of the best X posts I’ve ever seen, about the difficulties of debating modern liberals: “It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”

This post was the first thing that jumped to my mind when I saw the headlines and chatter around last week’s New Yorker essay on pregnancy by Apoorva Tadepalli, which boldly declared, “You can be kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, or almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant, and still test positive for pregnancy.” While Tadepalli’s piece was a thoughtful reflection on the pain of miscarriage and the uncertainty of pregnancy, it continues a theme prompted by pro-abortion advocates to deliberately misunderstand and reject objective reality surrounding human nature and human value.

Tadepalli goes through her many, difficult experiences of miscarriage, experiences that included a significant number of false-positive pregnancy tests even after miscarrying. Most of the piece concerned the fragility of pregnancy and the lack of certainty surrounding pregnancy testing. My heart broke thinking of the pain Tadepalli must have experienced going through such events, all while being inundated with a social media deluge of happy couples rejoicing while clutching pregnancy tests with two clear lines.

Despite the salutary sensitivity it should encourage toward couples experiencing loss (the best parts of the essay), it is flawed. It repeatedly jumps from the imperfection of pregnancy testing to an alleged indeterminacy in pregnancy itself. The fact that embryonic development is fragile does not mean that a woman can be somewhere between pregnant and not pregnant. Testing just lacks the sophistication to discern, in every circumstance, a woman’s objective status or prognosis: formerly pregnant but recently miscarried, pregnant but soon to miscarry, experiencing ectopic pregnancy, etc.

Citing University of Illinois biological anthropologist Kate Clancy’s work, Tadepalli discusses the “mythmaking of pregnancy” as a “linear experience” that results in the “fairy tale ending of a healthy living child.” It is a narrative that she rejects, since “most [pregnancies] end without a baby.” That last assertion is overstated, particularly if she measures pregnancy as beginning with implantation. But her broader point also errs philosophically. There is an objective, knowable order to pregnancy, a normative (if you will, “linear”) pathway that continues to exist despite the many and painful deviations from that norm that can take place for an individual woman and embryo. It does, in fact, end in childbirth — that is its telos, whether reached or not.

The fact that many women experience miscarriage does not mean that there isn’t a pattern to pregnancy. An embryo failing to implant or survive does not render his or her mother questionably pregnant. This is where I fundamentally disagree with Tadepalli: There is a difference between objective truth and our experience of it.

So the New Yorker published an essay with some incorrect ideas — who cares? Well, this kind of obfuscation around pregnancy isn’t unique. The pro-abortion academic community of OB/GYNs is profoundly dedicated to pretending not to understand very basic concepts surrounding pregnancy and abortion, mostly in the service of pro-abortion policy. Tadepalli’s essay fits in with the ultra-left American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’(ACOG) semantic maneuvers around the definition of pregnancy, which have impacted debates around hormonal contraception and their abortifacient properties for decades. While the chief mechanism for most forms of contraception is to prevent ovulation, they also can thin the lining of the woman’s uterus to make it hostile to implantation, in the event that “breakthrough” ovulation and fertilization still occurs. This was central to the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Supreme Court decision in 2014: The Christian businessowners did not want to cover this kind of hormonal contraception in their employer-based health insurance plan, because they viewed it as abortifacient.

Shortly after Hobby Lobby prevailed, ACOG reiterated its view that hormonal contraception is not “abortifacient,” but only by adopting specific definitions of “pregnancy” and “abortion” to make it so. In 1965, ACOG first defined pregnancy as starting at uterine implantation, not fertilization, a view that would be adopted by pro-abortion entities like Planned Parenthood and the Guttmacher Institute. It defines induced abortion as “an intervention intended to terminate a pregnancy so that it does not result in a live birth.” By ACOG’s logic, an abortion cannot take place when implantation-pregnancy has not begun. Thus, a drug or device that prevents implantation is not abortifacient.

These were silly semantics from the get-go, with scholars raising the possibility that ACOG’s definitional change was intended to convince patients about the moral permissibility of such drugs, rather than to provide definitional clarity. Decades after ACOG’s linguistic change, a majority of OB/GYNs still rejected it, defining pregnancy as beginning at fertilization. In fact, the question was raised whether ACOG’s definition could constitute a problem for informed consent: A woman who wants to prevent conception but does not want to harm a new human organism would be deceived if she and her doctor operate with different definitions of “pregnancy” and, therefore, “abortion.”

ACOG’s linguistic games were a silly dodge to critical questions of morality. The core of the pro-life, anti-abortion position is that innocent human beings are valuable at every stage of life, that we may not actively kill them, and that we may not unduly deprive them of basic support for life. Whether a new organism has implanted in the uterus yet is irrelevant.

I think Tadepalli’s pregnancy-ambiguity comes from a similar ideological place. She explicitly mentions abortion as a legitimate potential outcome that deviates from the “fairytale” conception of “linear” pregnancy. The large number of fertilized eggs — new human organisms — that fail to implant is often cited against the pro-life view. If so many of these organisms die without external intervention, of what value is any one embryo? To deny an objective reality of pregnancy altogether due to the uncertainty of a pregnancy outcome mitigates the moral weight of any intervention to interrupt it (abortion) or facilitate it (creating new embryos via IVF who will mostly be destroyed).

In short, this isn’t a one-off. Abortion has long maintained its popularity through the manipulation of language: “choice,” “clump of cells,” “reproductive care,” “product of conception.” Those of us who believe in objective human truth and dignity must resist this lexical slipperiness extending to the definition of pregnancy itself.